Author Govert SchullerPosted on Categories Philosophy
Introduction.
In this blog I will compress into a short story my proposed periodization of Modernity, bookended by the Renaissance and Post-modernity. My idiosyncratic idea is to place the start of modernity in 1620 and its end in 1926.
The Start of Modernity in 1620
The choice of 1620 has two reasons. First, it was the winter of that year that Descartes had his most sustained meditations on his own intellectual traditions and authorities, all of which he deemed contradictory and not well-founded. He had the time and opportunity to do so because he was part of a Catholic army besieging Prague in 1620 in the context of the 30-year war (1618-1648) fought between Catholic and Protestant powers. So, reason one for 1620 is the moment Descartes hits upon, or constitutes, the experience of ‘Cogito ergo sum’ and its substantive mind-matter dichotomy.
The Esotericist Renaissance
Reason two has to do with what specific event triggered that war and what mythic-intellectual movement there and then found its demise. And here I will have to digress on what came before Modernity to which it was a partial reaction, and that is the astonishing Renaissance, but then in its mythic and philosophical aspects and not its usual humanist and artistic ones.
For starters, two sets of manuscripts, which came to the west around the 1470s, had a profound influence on the intellectual start of the Renaissance: 1) many of the Platonic dialogues coming from the Islamic east by way of Constantinople and 2) the so-called Corpus Hermeticum (CH), a collection of manuscripts in Greek many people thought were written at least before 1,000 BCE by an ancient and wise magus by the name of Hermes Trismegistus or Thrice Great Hermes. Both the terms hermeticism and hermeneutics are derived from the name of this mythic character.
These manuscripts contained a lot of magical, Gnostic and other pagan, pre-Christian ideas. The translation of the CH into Latin by the humanist and Platonist Marsilio Ficino got right of way before Plato. The first volume, titled Pimander, was published in 1471. Apparently intellectuals then were more interested in magical, esoteric, occult ideas and practices than the more sober, transcendental thoughts of Plato.
Ideas like ‘As above, so below’ (i.e. a sympathetic parallel between the microcosm of man and the macrocosm of the universe), the harmony of the cosmos, alchemy (the transmutation of lead into gold and the soul into divinity), astrology, and hidden sources of wisdom in Egypt and the east, were part and parcel of this ‘stream’, now named by academia Western Esotericism. Throughout the 15th and 16th century these ideas were very influential, but later historians did not give them much attention and so that aspect of the Renaissance became more or less forgotten. But in the early 17th century there were even some German principalities where these ideas were not only common but were half openly promoted by its rulers. One had as its capital Heidelberg in the Palatinate, the other was Prague in Bohemia.
Side Story
Now, one more step back before going forward, there existed something like the position of Holy Roman Emperor, which position was not Roman but Catholic, usually not that holy, and without an empire. It was a tradition since 9th century Emperor Charlemagne (Charles the Great) to have someone in that position, which became increasingly devoid of real power and territory, but was still something the Catholics and Protestants respected. And the person for that position was democratically chosen by his peers, i.e. a small quorum of other kings, princes and aristocrats.
Till 1612 it was Rudolf II of Bohemia, a Catholic, who held the title and he was an avid ‘western esotericist’ with his town Prague a free-haven for alchemists to set up their smokey laboratories and astrologers to cast their predictions. Catholics and Protestants alike did not necessarily look favorably on such practices. When the Bohemian nobles came together to choose the next king of their realm they chose Prince Frederick V of the Palatinate, who was Protestant and had strong esotericist sympathies. He accepted and moved to Prague in November 1620. With this crown came also the right to vote for the next Holy Roman Emperor, who might this time be a Protestant as the Protestants had gained with Frederick a majority in that electoral college.
Long story short, the whole of Catholic Christendom was verbally opposed to that prospect, but to no avail, and Frederick was crowned King of Bohemia. The Catholics then marched on Prague and beat Frederick at the Battle of the White Mountain, an early win in the 30 year war in which almost the whole of Europe was involved, including Descartes on the side of the Catholics. Frederick lost both Bohemia and the Palatinate and fled to The Netherlands. With him went the last instance of the Occult Renaissance in political power.
Preliminary Summary
So, it was at the siege of the stronghold of the last and losing ‘western esotericist’ Prince Frederick that Descartes had his profound ideas, which were more or less instrumental in challenging all this esotericism as unscientific and merely mythic. And a few decades later a Frenchman, Causabon, proved that the Corpus Hermeticum was composed in the 3rd century CE, so there went its authority as something wise and ancient.
And I just read Hegel to the same effect:
The discovery of the laws of nature enabled men to contend against the monstrous superstitions of the time, as also against all notions of mighty alien powers which magic alone could conquer. (Philosophy of History, Dover edition, p. 440)
Under the clear and precise eye of rationalism and science the esoteric tradition went underground. Therefore Frederick’s loss in 1620 was the second reason to have Modernity start in that year and a good reason to mark it off as the end of the Renaissance. I always thought this to be quite neat, but never wrote it down.
One last speculation is the question wether Descartes and Frederick might have met in the Netherlands in the 1620s and what conversation they might have had. A subject of possible agreement could have been the role of the pineal gland.
The End of Modernity in 1926
The reason to place modernity’s end at 1926 has to do with the thorough critique published that year of Descartes’ philosophy in Heidegger’s Being and Time. Basically his critique was that the Cartesian notion of both subject and object as separate substances was premised on the mistaken idea to interpret, or project onto, subject and object the ontological category of substantiality in the sense that both have the reified nature of being something ‘thing-ly’ present-at-hand (Vorhanden).
Being and Time itself can also be construed as the beginning of post-modernity given its impact on the major thinkers of that movement. Of course before Heidegger there were Darwin, Nietzsche and Freud deeply challenging Modernity’s concept of a rational and progressing humanity, but Darwin and Freud were very rational and scientific in their aims and Nietzsche was still in the 1920s a bit marginal. It is only after the collective traumatic shock of WWII that Post-modernism gains traction.
And Modernity did not go unchallenged in its 300 year reign. Romanticism, German Idealism and intellectual developments in the latter half of the 19th century posed serious challenges to it. And the tradition of Western Esotericism had many small comebacks in the persons of Emanuel Swedenborg, Jacob Boehme and Anton Mesmer, and in the movements of American spiritualism with its off-shot the so-called occult revival in the US and Europe after 1875.
Madame Blavatsky and her Theosophy had a clear and important role in this movement, reviving many esotericist ideas from the Renaissance, combining it with eastern ideas, and her own prolific fantasies and stage magic.
Though it is interesting to also look for remnants of esotericism in Descartes’ or Hegel’s ideas, one of the more surprising and underreported developments in the history of philosophy was how Kant had reacted to the voluminous writings of Swedenborg, a mining engineer and a seer creating vivid descriptions of the many mansions of heaven. Kant might have believed these writings initially, but reacted later strongly against them, influencing his epistemology regarding phenomena and noumena and implicitly declaring Swedenborgian claims beyond the pale of experienceability and conceptualization.
And Romanticism might also have had adherents dabbling in western esotericism. Hegel comes to mind, but I do not have access to sources to deepen that. What is clear is that Romanticism’s predilection for traditions and history, and resistance to cold rationality, would not put a principled opposition to appropriate Western Esotericist memes like bygone golden ages, hidden ancient wisdoms, eastern sages, and other enchanted narratives.
Conclusion
Taking all the above in, I propose the following demarcations between the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, Modernity and Post-Modernity:
I) 1471. End of the Middle Ages and start of the Renaissance with the publication of the Pimander.
II) 1620. End of the Renaissance and beginning of Modernity with the defeat of Frederick of the Palatinate in Bohemia where Descartes had its breakthrough meditations.
III) 1926. End of Modernity and beginning of Post-Modernity with Heidegger’s critique of Descartes in the publication of Being and Time.
Of course this periodization can be easily contested as it reflects personal preferences, it still has an internal logic I find compelling and fun to play around with.